


Inconclusive

by sidana



Series: The Peter Black Stories [6]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Missing Scene, Spoilers: Serpentine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 13:29:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17387261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidana/pseuds/sidana
Summary: Peter and Nathaniel talk at the end of 'Serpentine'





	Inconclusive

Inconclusive

Disclaimer- not my characters, not my universe. I’ll put everyone back where I found them when I’m done playing with them

Spoilers- Serpentine

**********

Peter turned the corner and looked down the hallway, noticing Wyatt sitting in a chair and pretending to look through a stack of brochures on fishing charters. He noticed the other man’s eyes flick briefly to the small of his back and he gave a small nod. 

“Just a sec,” Wyatt said and he got up and walked toward a room door. “Nathaniel said you’d be coming by.” 

As Wyatt knocked and had a few words with Nathaniel, Peter found himself relieved that it wasn’t his sister on guard duty that day. Any time someone who was more powerful than they tried to seem and took too much of a personal interest in him was more than a little creepy in his book, and at least with the Wyatt half of the Wonder Twins, it seemed to be just business. 

“Hey, come on in,” Nathaniel said as he appeared in the doorway. 

“Thanks. The last week has been a little intense,” 

“You’re been taking understatement lessons from a number of masters in that,” Nathaniel said. “Dominant hand?”

“Right. Huh?” 

“Anita’s gotten me in the habit of not blocking the gun hand,” Nathaniel said, pulling him into the room with a hug. “And the shirt drape covers it well visually but we can’t miss the smell of it, even in human form.” 

“I had a concealed carry permit that’s reciprocal in Florida, and Ted let me borrow from his toolbox.” Peter said as he heard Wyatt close the door behind him. “Didn’t bring anything myself because my parents’ fucking wedding shouldn’t involve fucking krakens and a near death experience, but you know- fuck my life.”

Nathaniel responded by hugging him tighter and Peter found himself really relaxing for the first time since the shouting had started days ago. He made Peter feel warm and safe and was a far better security blanket than the gun at his back. It was too nice in some ways. 

“You tensed up there. Everything okay?” Nathaniel said.

“Just remembering the stuff about lycanthropy and touch and some discussion of just what falls under ‘inconclusive’, which seems to mean they really don’t know much yet.” 

“Alternately, it could be because I know I’m a world class platonic hugger. You’re someone who had to be the strong one for your mother for years, and then you wanted to be the strong one again to get other people to take you seriously. But everyone sometimes just needs a safe place where they can just let it all go and not have to play the tough guy in front of all of Ted’s friends.” 

“Thanks,” he said, relaxing again and feeling Nathaniel’s warm breath over his left ear. A little while later, the hug seemed to break up naturally. 

“If you want anything to drink, help yourself to the minibar,” Nathaniel said, gesturing to the other side of the suite. 

Peter peered inside, thinking that his driver’s license said he was legal and that one of the craft beers sounded really good right now. Bu his stepfather had rules about drinking and carrying, and the rules were there to increase the odds of survival when things went pear-shaped so he tried not to sigh as he took a Pepsi instead. He opened up the can and took a seat on the couch. Nathaniel had already taken the other side of it and was sipping one of those zero calorie flavored sparkling waters his mother seemed to like. 

“Thanks for letting me come by.”

“We’re friends; it’s what friends do.” 

“I’d think you’d get sick of hearing about me and my problems at some point, and I don’t want to seem too needy.” 

“You’re becoming family, though someone your age calling me Uncle Nathaniel sounds a little weird.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, looking down at the leg that had been covered in bandages until recently. “It’s funny. I hate my old scars so much, both how they look and what they mean. And then I see my leg and I hate how there isn’t more there. Even if puncture wounds in humans don’t show all that much after they heal, there still should be something there and it isn’t, and the empty space is like this reminder of thinks getting all screwed up again and how no one really has any good answers.”

“Micah was going to have some people call around.”

“And he did. The preliminary information he was getting back was that a double lycanthropy exposure was always a pretty rare occurrence, and that after exposure, it’s kind of like how some people can get chicken pox and then it turns into shingles years or even decades later. Except if you get shingles, it can only hurt badly enough that you feel like you want to die. The chicken pox virus doesn’t make you lose your mind, your humanity, and then get loose and kill other people. And there wasn’t anyone who was really trying to put all the pieces together. Different animal groups, different cities, no one was talking to each other and there wasn’t enough data to try to find the pattern. Then you have the human doctors, who know what happened when someone showed up in an emergency room and for a couple weeks after that, but who don’t know what happened to that person five years or later. And the people who ended up inconclusive or even positive years later weren’t exactly going to go back to their doctor and say ‘by the way now’. 

Which I perfectly understand. I mean it’s bad enough to have the big scarlet ‘I’ on my permanent medical record now, much less have it written down somewhere that a person is lycanthropy positive. Bur you’d think at least the different shifter groups could have shared information better.” 

“Micah will probably be working on it once we get back to St. Louis.”

“Yeah. I mean, he’s someone that can be good enough at hiding what he’s thinking that I think he should go to Vegas and clean up playing poker, but I got the feeling he was not happy at all about the lack of communication, and how no one told the human medical establishment that double exposures were a bad idea once word of the pilot medical program got around. Me, I’m stuck looking up at the moon every month and wondering. 

And the only answer I get is that nothing more may happen. I just go through the rest of my life a little less basic human than I used to be. Or that it could all change and I could go positive at any point where my body is under a lot of stress. It’s not like lifestyle choice really matters either. Out in California a few months back, there was a woman who went from inconclusive to positive when she ruptured her achilles tendon playing pick-up soccer in the park. I guess that’s just life for you,” he said, not really hiding the bitterness in his voice, He felt Nathaniel drape an arm around his shoulders. It wasn’t going to fix everything but it helped in the short term.

“You aren’t alone. If you need to talk, I’m there for you. There are a lot of people who can help you; just say the word.” 

“Thanks. Though there is still stuff I need to take care of on my own. I had to call Claudia today. There was some work I was supposed to do for her after the wedding.” What he had done for the rats had mostly bene courier and surveillance work. He had once literally spent several hours watching paint dry as he waited for someone else to flush a target downstream toward him. But there was more to building a reputation to get contract work than being known as a shooter and the rats had paid a lot better than what he mad working at his mother’s shop. He was going to miss that. 

“I’m guessing that work called for a basic human?”

“Which I apparently no longer am. So we actually had a pretty good talk after I explained that I had to pull out of a job for medical reasons, and things go into limbo on good terms. Apparently if people like me go positive, they get the animals of both lycanthropy types they were exposed to, and she said that if things changed, they’d have someone come pick me up. Which would probably be a lot better than hanging with the tigers.”

“We’re trying to shake up the tiger hierarchy and caste system and seem to be having some decent results so far. Next time you’re in St. Louis, you, me, Dev and Sin need to do a night on the town together. I won’t tell Anita what happened if you don’t.” 

“Deal. Though I’d probably always fit in with the rats better. And it’s still weird to feel that way after spending eight years of my life wanting to grow up and kill any shifter that looked at me funny. Um, no offense meant?” 

“You learned that life’s a lot more complex than you first thought and adapted because you’re a survivor. I’m glad that wee could become friends.” 

“At this point, I’m starting to feel like the majority of friends I’m making aren’t quite basic human. Claudia even talked about finding work for me if they took me back to St. Louis. Said that it might require a good amount of travel since they’re overstaffed in St. Louis right now, and it would actually be good to see more of the world.” 

“You’re still thinking college for now though?” 

“Yeah, and if I live at home, not only do I get to keep training with Edward when he’s in town and a few of his friends when he’s not, I also don’t have to spend too much from the college fund Mom set up from Dad’s insurance money. If I keep school cheap and graduate on time, I get the balance of it in cash when I’m twenty five. And I’ve been trying build up savings and not spend money I don’t have to. My only big expense right now is plane tickets to Vegas every so often, and if you can be flexible with the dates a little, that’s not too expensive.”

“Rachel?”

“Yeah.” 

“Have you talked to her yet?” 

“With what little I or anyone else seems to know. But we’re still good, even if I’m not always sure what she sees in me.” 

“A friend with benefits that’s willing to get on a plane to come see you? It’s a pretty impressive gesture to make to someone.”

“And though neither of us is really looking for a relationship or wanting something exclusive right now, she gets me in some important ways and I think I get her, and we actually have fun going around the parts of Las Vegas that aren’t the usual touristy stuff. It really is friend as well as benefits with her. I just don’t want to discover that inconclusive means I figure out a way to screw things up.”

“With full positive lycanthropy, the first couple of months are pretty rough in terms of learning how to keep your head together. Most other shifters are going to understand that, and that mistakes and slip ups are going to happen early on. Though there does come a point when you’re expected to be able to stay in control no matter what you’re feeling and it can be pretty unforgiving when its assumed you’re at or past that point.” 

“Right now, she seems like she likes me as I am, and it would hurt so much to lose it,” he said, trying not to think about how he could cope if Rachel too decided he was too much of a freak.

“You’re doing a good job of thinking about what you want, taking about what you want, and making sure she wants that too,” Nathaniel sad. “And there can actually be some advantages of having a bit of cat lycanthropy in the bloodstream.” 

“What do you mean?” Peter asked as he took a sip of the Pepsi. 

“The lions get all the press in that regard, but pretty much all the big cats including the tigers have a shorter refractory period than human normal.”

Peter did a literal spit take at that, sending the soda from his mouth across the hotel room’s floor. The two men then scrambled to do a quick clean up with towels from the bathroom. 

“You’re serious?’ Not trying to pull one on me?” 

“There are some things I don’t joke about,” Nathaniel said as they returned to the couch. 

“That’s something they also didn’t tell us about in health class. Not that anything in the Respectful Relationships part of health class was fact-based or useful. The whole point of that seemed to be that we should never think of sex as fun or pleasure ever.” 

“I think that’s the same health class Sin had to take to graduate in Missouri. We actually did have some fun with that textbook when Jason was in town and one night after dinner out at the house, him and the twins did dramatic reenactments of the case studies.”

“You mean like the one about Chloe who had sex with the vampire and the condom broke because, hey, abstinence-only curriculum so of course birth control always fails, and then she got pregnant and died because of Vlad’s syndrome when the baby tried to gnaw its way out of her abdomen? I think Maddie Reilly managed to get a failing class participation grade for that unit because of several declarations about how even though she considered herself to be pro-life most of the time, she would have been getting an abortion right after that pregnancy test,” Peter said.

“That would be the same one. Chloe does make an impression. I don’t think Sin ever turned that book back in, and we can do another round of acting the case studies out after dinner the next time you’re in St. Louis. Provided no one burned the book first,” Nathaniel said.

“You know all the years I spent in therapy, it was like this big push to get me fixed enough to have a normal life, like that was the only possible life goal someone should have. There were some things that really helped, some thing I learned that I needed to learn, but in the end me and normal life are just not things that fit together in this reality. 

You and Ted are some of the few in my life that have been able to say that, ‘if normal isn’t in the cards, then here’s what you can learn to have a better outcome for you and the people you care about’. I mean even Anita, who treated me like a grown up from the first time I met her and which I’ll always be grateful about, makes it pretty clear that she wishes I’d walk away from the family business, go to college and settle down far away from the monsters with a person or persons who make me happy. Thanks for saying it’s okay to not fit into some sort of neat box like that,” Peter said.

“Therapy has been great for me too, but I think a lot of otherwise good therapists go too far and assume that something is broken and needs to be fixed when that something is part of their nature instead of caused by nurture or lack thereof. I understand how hard it can be to untangle that in your head, and when I see someone who is trying to be a good person and figure out how to be comfortable with their own nature despite bad shit happening in their life, I want to help them out,” Nathaniel said.

“It’s been so good to have someone I could really talk to,” Peter said, wrapping an arm around Nathaniel in a side hug. “Even when therapy is going well, it’s like I can hit a spot where they ask if I can imagine what life would have been if my father hadn’t died, and it’s like the first black mark if I’m honest and say I’ve never really thought about that because my father dying and everything surrounding that was just such an absolute event in my mind I can’t picture an alternative about what happened if he lived. 

The second question was that if I’d tried to imagine what it would be like without Ted in my life. It’s not like I can give the honest answer, which is probably dead. Best case, they assume I’m doing the angsty teenage thing and we spend a couple weeks on why self-harm is not the answer.” 

“Self-harm because of depression or other pain is a whole other realm than being a happy masochist. So what was the worst case then?,” Nathaniel said.

“Worst case is they go digging for more details of what happened to me when I was fourteen, and aren’t happy about how much I have to censor that for anyone who wasn’t there or part of the family. So safer just to lie, which I know you’re not supposed to do with your therapist, and say I probably would have muddled through high school and joined the military instead if they would have had me. 

But instead, Ted and Anita saved me. Then I asked Ted to teach me to do what he does, because I never wanted to feel like a victim again. It wasn’t long after that Edward took over the training. I don’t think it was ever abusive; I always had the option to walk away from what he asked of me. But he was hard on me, really, really hard. In the beginning, it was about making sure I was serious and not just wanting to play soldier. When he learned just how serious I was, it got worse. He said that what was out there would give you no mercy, no favors, no forgiveness, so he was doing what he did so I wouldn’t be unprepared. And every single time we went out to train, I was terrified. Not of Edward, though I probably should have been. But that at the end of the day, that he’d say I was a lost cause or never going to be good enough and I should just go home and stop wasting his time. 

That couldn’t happen. He’s my Obi-Wan, even though I know he’s not entirely on the side of the angels. I need him so much in my life, and when it looked like there would be no wedding, I was starting to freak a little, not at just how I want him and Mom happy and together, but at the idea he’d be gone while I was still his apprentice with so much to learn. And part of the reason why I let myself get hurt was that I got caught up in thinking about that and didn’t realize that more than just Dixie’s words were a threat. When we all get back home, I know there’s going to be a debriefing with Edward and not Ted about that and if I handled the situation in the best way. I am so not looking forward to that, but I know it’s necessary because I could have managed it all better, and since I lived this time I need to learn from my mistakes,” Peter said.

“Remember that someone with the psychic ability to mess with everyone’s mind was doing just that, and plenty of people were passing the idiot ball around. You were showing a lot better judgement with Dixie than I did when a guy who used to watch my movies just about had me convinced to confess to a murder I didn’t commit, ” Nathaniel said. 

“Your movies, shit that stuff’s on the internet and never going to be really gone,” Peter said. “At least with what happened to me, any evidence of it was burned salted, bombed and rendered into component molecules. To know it’s always out there and there’s some pervert out there still enjoying it…”

“One area where therapy has been really helpful is getting me to figure out how to focus on my life now and what’s good with it, which is a lot at this point rather than what’s out there with that. If you want to switch, I think my current really good therapist is willing to do sessions on Skype now,” Nathaniel said.

“Can you send me the contact info later?”

“Will do that, and if it’s okay, I can also give him some information about why you’re wanting him and not someone local to to you.” 

“The would be good. It’s hard to start That Talk with someone I’ve never met.”

“You aren’t alone,” Nathaniel said, draping his arm across Peter’s shoulders. 

“I'm not someone who is alone with any of this. That actually makes me feel more feel pissed at the doctors, the ones in St Louis, who were pushing a treatment that was a lot more experimental than they realized, and the ones down here who are supposed to clean up after the experiment. The best they can do is tell me to blood test forty eight hours before the full moon and see if anything’s changed, and by the way, can I please do the test under my own name and not anonymously so the results can be included in their follow up study and on my permanent medical record. Sorry, I’m too selfish to do that. 

So I ask what I they think I should do if one of those tests go positive, and it’s the total party line about checking myself into a safe house. It’s not like it’s any secret what a rat trap those places they are, no pun intended.”

“It’s your subconscious acting up,” Nathaniel said.

“If I do go positive, I have resources. I have you and your offer to take me clubbing with some of the St. Louis tigers. I’ve got Claudia on good terms. I’ve got the head of the Coalition’s phone number on my phone, and Micah’s been on how many tv programs at this point? And that’s the start of my list. How many people who did the second exposure vaccine don’t have anyone on their list, and either won’t do the blood tests or don’t have anyone outside the rat traps to talk to if they do and it goes positive? How many little kid could lose their fathers because some asshole doctor who was so arrogant that they didn’t really try to do more research before offering a so-called cure?”

The door went open, and Wyatt came through. Peter started to untangle himself from Nathaniel so his hands were free. 

“Stand down. Stand down. It’s good. We’re okay,” Nathaniel said, using the arm Peter hadn’t managed to get away from to push him back down to the couch. 

“I have to check out the shouting,”Wyatt said, and Peter realized that the shouting had come from him. 

“Sorry. Bad week,” he managed to the other man. 

“I’m back in the hall again,” Wyatt said, and Peter tracked him visually until he returned there and closed the door. 

At that point, he let himself slump forward, his face in his hands. He felt Nathaniel’s warm hand make circles on his back as he started to cry. Again, it helped a little as he cried a fair amount of tension and anger out of his body until he felt like he could talk again.

“Some people ask me why I want to go into Ted’s business. A few others who know a different world have asked me why I want go into Edward’s business. This is a question I can answer easy and honest. It’s because when I was eight, something awful happened to my family. Not everyone survived, but I did and I want to reduce the number of items it can happen to other families. I don’t know if it will ever be enough or if I’ll be good enough to make a difference but I have to try.” 

“You’re good. Even Edward and Anita can’t deny that. And it will,” Nathaniel said with perfect confidence in his voice. “It very much will.” 

At a time when it seemed like everything in his life was being put through a blender again, that confidence made all the difference in the world to him.


End file.
